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| Please, America, please have been awake for my Nazi class... |
How many times have you heard a variation on this historical-content-laden polemic: "Hitler killed seven million Jews during WWII" --at least seven hundred times per Western Civ. II class? Wow, that A. Hitler must have been one busy little fellow! If we take the number of seconds per year (31,536,000), multiply it by 5 (175,680,000) and divide that by 7,000,000, we get an astonishing kill rate of one Jew every 22.5 seconds. Not bad for a middle aged Austrian politician who was also a vegetarian, hypochondriac, and a devout believer in the occult. And that doesn't include the Allied soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians he killed as well.
Relax- I am not trying to cry "shenanigans" on the Holocaust. It totally happened and we should never forget that it did, indeed, happen. All I am doing is making the point that Hitler did not personally go out and whack 7 million Jews, or any of the other 53
million people who died directly because of war, or indirectly because of its associated outbreaks of disease and famine. In fact, as unlikely as it seems, Hitler very probably
never personally killed anybody during his life, except for himself at the end. This is because one of the psychoses he suffered from was
hemophobia, fear of blood. So, how'd all these people die? They died because Hitler had help --a LOT of help.
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| "Zere just veren't enough hours in za day to kill 60,000,000 peoples!" |
And who might these helper have been, I hear you cry. The worst of the worst were grabbed by the British-American-Free French at war's end were put on trial in Nuremberg and included Herman Goering, who slipped through the hangman's noose by poisoning himself when the outcome became certain. Then there was Rudolf Hess, a.k.a. Vice-Fuhrer, a.k.a. the Nazi official who flew to Scotland in 1941 in order to negotiate peace with Great Britain, a.k.a. Spandau Prison's last and mostly only inmate.
Another bunch were grabbed by something called Operation Paperclip, flown to the USA, and ended up putting Neil Armstrong (no relation to Lance) and "Buzz" Aldrin on the moon. One last bunch made the move to Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina and lived the South American life in exile, only to spend it forever looking over their shoulders for agents of Israel's Mossad who wanted to have a chat with them over in Tel Aviv. One guy, and I SWEAR I am not making this up, moved to Norwood, Massachusetts in 1955, got a job at a car assembly plant in Framingham, and lived until he was finally outed in 1994, stripped of his US citizenship and put on trial for his crimes against the Jews in Vilnius,
Lithuania.
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| Norvood... Why didn't I ever move to Vestvood? #&*@ing Jews... |
Hitler was also helped by lots of ordinary Germans who, for one reason or another, were so totally brainwashed by Nazi propaganda or were so afraid of disobeying orders to do terrible things to fellow human beings, that they up and did them anyway. To be fair, a lot of these people just were cogs in the Nazi Engine of Death and either had no idea of the implications of what they did, or consciously turned away from the horror of their own small contributions. Many Germans served in Germany's armed forces and did so honorably, performing the soldier's duty that sometimes includes killing enemy soldiers. A few Germans worked for the Underground, helping Allied spies and escaped prisoners of war and concentration camp escapees, putting their own lives at risk to help strangers. But then, you also had this fine bunch of Aryan women:
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| "Klaus invited me to a 'party in his pants.' What do you suppose that means?" |
Of all the guards at Nazi death camps, about 10% of them were women. Now just a minute here! Aren't women supposed to be the moral compass of the human race? Aren't women supposed to stick up for each other? How does one explain the cruelties, savageries and petty acts of unkindness perpetrated by these women on their women charges in the camps? Again, relax --I am not going all misogynistic on you, just simply pointing out that Hitler's helpers included women as well as men. And this is not even including the women at home who had as many Aryan babies as they could so that they could get get something called the
Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter, A.K.A. the German Mother's Cross of Honor. It came in three classes: bronze, silver and gold, and to get one, you had to give birth to and "appropriately" raise at least four children so that they could serve the fascist state.
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| "Vill dis cross make mien boobies look bigger?" |
Hitler's helpers came from every race, religion, social class, educational level, ethnicity and country of origin in Western Europe. They included lots of Germans (duuuh!) and lots of French, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Czechs, Slavs, Russians, Poles, Italians, Rumanians, Albanians, Spaniards --you get the picture. These collaborators had various motives. Some only wanted to preserve their country's existence within the ever expanding Nazi Empire. This was probably the desire of French WWI hero-turned-Nazi-puppet, Philippe Petain. Others were more interested in trying to out-Nazi the Nazis who now ruled their country. This was probably the plan of the notorious Vidkun Quisling of Norway.
At this point, we should all pause and ask ourselves, What would I have done if I had lived under Hitler's rule? It's all well and good to sit in judgement of ordinary people who did terrible things in the mid 20th Century, here on our high perch of the 21st Century, where we all live at the Sky Pad Apartments, have flying cars, talk-screen telephones, robot maids and have cool neighbors like the Jetsons. Ok, so we DO ACTUALLY have talk-screen phones, but my point is What Would I Have Done? And you know, constant reader and fellow bloggers, I have no idea what I would have done. I hope that I would have found the courage to at least passive-aggressively resisted Hitler and his minions, but the pressure to conform would have been immense and the penalties for non-conforming would have been so severe, that I just don't know if I could have had the
cojones to resist.
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The Face of a Collaborator?
Or just some goofy guy? |
But here's the thing, and the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century: nobody should have
ever have had to decide which side to be on, Nazi or Human, because Hitler
never should have been allowed access to the German political-military systems he then perverted to serve his ghoulish aims. He could have been
prevented from doing it all not through the firing squad, but through the BALLOT BOX.
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian national whose party, the German Socialist Worker's Party or Nazi party, was elected in a legal election held in a democratic manner in the Republic of Germany. The German people sincerely believed that he could "make Germany great again," especially after its humiliating loss to the Allies in WWI and the crippling effects of the Great Depression. They liked the message Hitler was putting out there: ultra-nationalism, blame the Jews for undermining German greatness, xenophobism towards the rest of the world --especially people not regarded as "True Germans" --and vows to re-arm and throw Germany's weight around again.
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| Vote for me, or else no strudel for you! |
The German people also liked the way Hitler campaigned for his party. He flew all over the country in an airplane, still kind of a novelty at the time, making speeches before big crowds where he would denounce his opponents as "losers, whiners, communists, degenerates, un-German" and such. This was a big departure from politics as usual, in an age where politicians were expected to be polite and act like statesmen. Hitler looked like he was having an orgasm or a seizure in front of the microphone, depending on your angle of view.
There were others who helped Hitler at this stage, who stuffed his campaign bank account full of Deutschmarks, people like the industrialist father-son duo Gustav and Alfried Krupp, whose company, Krupp Iron Works, went on to manufacture tons of tanks, guns and cannons before being bombed into tiny bits of rusting iron by Allied air raids. There was the financial genius, Emil Kirdorf, who was such a Hitler fanboy that he published an early Hitler speech as a pamphlet that he circulated among fellow financiers.
The list goes on and on, including but not limited to companies that used slave laborers during WWII in order to produce war and consumer materials, and not all of these companies were headed up by the likes of Oscar Schindler. Make no mistake about it: Hitler was good for both business and the working man. In Hitler's Reich, the only unemployed were the very old, the very young, the very Jewish or the disabled (disabled through accidents at work --the physically or mentally handicapped were sent to the camps to be exterminated or experimented on).
Never forget. Never. Never forget what Hitler did. And. Never forget that Hitler Had Help.
Now we come to our own age, one where the demagogue this time is an American, but the message is the same: make America great again; my opponents are losers, whiners, un-American; foreigners are to blame for America's problem, especially foreigners who are here illegally from Central America so that they can live without fear of organized criminal gangs in all but failed states, raise their children in safety and a degree of comfort, make a pile of money through hard work and then retire to Florida. The supporters of this demagogue use the media for their propaganda war against the government of the United States of America. Here is one example of their graphic work:
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| Um, quote taken slightly out of context |
The obscenity above comes from a very scary site called glocktalk.com, the self-described "Leading Firearms Forum." If you visit the friendly folks there, you can chat with Eric (whose profile pic is a hideously grinning ghoul-thing), DonGlock26, or ChuteTheMall. I hope to God the FBI and ATF and the Secret Service are all watching these gun nuts. But maybe they aren't. Maybe they are instead investigating Anonymous for a
hacking they didn't even do. Meanwhile, look at how Mainstream Media handled the whole thing (sorry if you're a fan of The View, but they just crack me up sometimes! Again, not being a misogynist,
just reporting what's out there) Granted, there was a fair, balanced discussion by the co-hosts, but the fact remains that they got taken-in too, with 4/5 of them reacting with fear and distaste, while TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT: America, jittery from its war on terrorism, will go running to and defend any demagogue who "has all the answers" or "makes them feel safe," even if we have to sacrifice our liberty and freedom in the process. Because we're scared.
I urge you all to fact-check every lie passed off as fact that issues from candidate Donald Trump's mouth before you cast a vote for him, either in the primary or the general election, unless the Republicans can get their asses together and stop the man who could prove to be the beginning of the end for the American Republic. I urge you to laugh along with the late-nighters like
Jimmy Fallon,
Jimmy Kimmel,
John Oliver and
Seth Meyers, but also do what the co-hosts of The View suggest and VOTE. For anyone. Except. Donald Trump. In my opinion, an America lead by Herr Drumpf would be as intolerable, as brutal, as morally corrupt a place as Germany was under Adolf Hitler.
Don't be one of the little people who helped Der Donald. Learn something from history for once in your life and stop him before he turns this wonderful country of ours into the next incarnation of Nazi Germany, circa 1942.
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| No caption necessary. |
